HIS 701: History of Science from Descartes and Newton to Darwin and Einstein.

3 hours, 3 credits. (Not open to students who have taken HIE 301.) This course examines the nature and significance of scientific thinking in the work of Descartes, Leibnitz, and Newton; the conflicts between science and religion in the seventeenth century; materialism's penetration of biology from physics; the revolution in chemistry associated with Priestley and Lavoisier; the interface between science and the industrial revolution; the work of the French biologist Claude Bernard, illustrating the development of biology and experimental medicine; the startling work of Charles Darwin; and twentieth-century topics, such as field and atomic theory, relativity, and quantum theory and their important philosophical implications.